The other day I went to Google Maps and looked at my neighborhood. My mouth dropped open. It was way off. And when I say “way off” I mean WAY off. There are roads that don’t exist. There are misnamed roads. There is a road that exists, but that Google Maps doesn’t show. And perhaps most importantly, there is a road that is truncated in the middle — it doesn’t appear to go through.
This last mistake is the most puzzling to me. About the only thing I can figure is that in their attempt to make their maps better, they are using satellite data to adjust their maps. The reason I conjecture this is that the spot where they show the road stopping also happens to be where trees cover the road. If you are looking down on the road from above you can’t see the road. Therefore, an automated process might suppose that the road ends there. But it never has. When the road was built for this subdivision in the Fifties it always went through. I have a photocopy of the map for “Boyes Springs Village,” the name of this particular 1950s-era subdivision, and the roads that exist are clearly marked, and as they have existed since they were constructed (the map is dated July 1951).
Google says it gets its map data from various providers, although I couldn’t tell who was providing this misinformation. But like a good little netizen, I reported the errors. Maybe someday they’ll get fixed. But meanwhile, it doesn’t give me a lot of confidence about the map quality of other semi-rural areas like mine.
About Roy Tennant
Google of course is fallible. Even though people think it’s pronouncements are ex cathedra.
AS a soon-to-be author, I work a lot with maps, particularly for local detail. I can certainly confirm your Google Maps finding – errors in location (using a known street location) and what I know to be the correct geographic location. Alas, Google isn’t alone – mapping errors abound at the local level; Mapquest is right up there too. Navigating with GPS can be interesting too.
If you really want a fright, take a look at the street level view from Googlemaps. Wow, like driving a car right down your street although lagging at least a year or better. I’ve repainted and relandscaped at my house so I have a good gauge.
If it’s any consolation, I reported all those errors to Google and so far nearly all of them have been corrected — all just in a few days. Kudos to Google for getting on these issues and correcting them.
Roy,
Didn’t Google create the maps application ultimately to sell advertising? If that’s the case, they may not care about the accuracy of maps where you live, in “semi-rural” areas because businesses in your specific geographical area don’t purchase much advertising from them.
Google is a for-profit company deriving 95%+ of it’s income from recording and then selling YOUR clicking behavior to online advertisers.
Google exists to make profit. They are not the world’s online free library. If you haven’t yet, I would like to encourage you to do some digging into what Google records about you, for how long they keep it, and take a look at how citizen privacy advocates rate Google.